The large Book of Designs contains, among many plates familiar in design to us, though varied always in colouring, four, which we have not seen before, and can see nowhere else. The first is a colour-print of morning or Glad Day. It is a radiant design, but like many of these colour-prints of Blake, somewhat the worse for time, having the paint rubbed off and blackened in parts. Blake’s colour-printing process was as follows, according to the only extant account:
COLOUR-PRINTED DESIGN FROM “URIZEN.” 1794
Reproduced from the “Small Book of Designs”
He drew the outline heavily in chalk on a mill-board and put on the colour diluted with oil or glue in thick patches, and printed the wet impression off on to paper. He then worked upon this rough ground, when dry, in water colour. But only in a few instances did he show complete mastery of the ingenious method.
The second plate I would call attention to is a nightmare horror entitled the “Accusers of Theft, Adultery and Murder.” There are a trio of furies, only male instead of female; the watermark of the paper is 1794. A similar design, not so finely coloured, was sold at Messrs. Hodgson’s for £15 10s. The third is a lovely little gem representing John the Baptist preaching to a beautifully grouped crowd. Its fellow sold at the same sale for £26 10s. The fourth represents a semi-nude figure, with head downcast, sitting beneath the bent and blasted stump of a tree, while to the left a woman nude and of remarkable beauty tosses a child high in arm. It is thought that this plate may have been intended for a cancel in “America”; for another one, more beautiful in colouring than this, which was also sold at Messrs. Hodgson’s, and for £42, was found to bear some text from “America,” faintly discernible under the colouring on the upper half of the plate, which could be read only from the back.
In 1795 Blake produced the “Song of Los.” The Print Room copy is heavy and opaque in colour, though very splendid and rich, and the Library copy is similar in most respects. It was evidently colour-printed after the method described above, for the peculiar mottled backgrounds are an effect that could not very well have been realized by any other method, nor even then are they understandable, unless indeed Blake had a wooden stamp which he impressed on the blobs of colour first laid on the paper itself.
The “Song of Los” is the Song of Time, and includes the “Songs of Africa, and Asia.” So now Blake has written a song of prophecy for each of the four great parts of the earth. “Africa” deals in a wild incoherent way with the rise of the various religions. Urizen delivers his laws of brass and iron and gold to all the Nations. These were “the nets and gins and traps to clutch the joys of Eternity,” and Har and Heva—representatives of natural humanity—find “all the vast of Nature shrunk before their shrunken eyes,” for the senses are the limits put upon perception.
Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave
Laws and Religions to the Sons of Har, binding them more
And more to Earth: closing and restraining:
Till a philosophy of the Five Senses was complete.
Urizen wept and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke!
In “Asia” Urizen hears the despairing cry of his creation, and himself shudders and weeps, but unavailingly. Orc is heard raging on Mount Atlas, where he is chained down with the chain of jealousy. Orc is the Flame of Genius, the true deliverer of the Race. He was chained by his father and mother in fear of Urizen’s jealousy, but we know that he will break free at last, and bring his living fire into the hearts of the chosen of the peoples.